Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply. [LWN.net]

Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 30, 2007 20:49 UTC (Mon) by Cardinal_Bill (guest, #23688)
In reply to: Licensing is the easy part by jsarets
Parent article: Microsoft trying to get code open-source certification (LinuxWorld)

I read something somewhere, how's that for specific but I think it was on ZDNet, which said the OSI has a rule (the number 8 seems to come to mind) that said no to OS specific things. Along the way there was mention that the Microsoft licensing might require that it only operate under Windows.

Mutually exclusive I believe. Not much caring about MS and their licenses I paid scant attention.

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Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 30, 2007 21:17 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The this will be huge PR blunder no matter what OSI will do. There are few licenses which qualify as free software licenses and OSI will have no sane way to rebuff them but most of them don't qualify as free software and will be rejected. But if even one license will be approved Microsoft will be able to use it for advertisement like "our shared source licensing got OSI approval! we are friends of Open Software now!"...

Remember Creative Commons and RMS story ? There are bunch of CC licenses: free ones, semi-free ones, non-free ones. And while there are a lot of CC licensed works most of them are not free. FSF admitted that some of CC licenses are free but added disclaimer "Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to highlight the substance of the license choices. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately, “Which one?”". May be it will be good idea to actually count amount of code contributed on OSI-approved terms and non-OSI-approved terms to have at least some rebuttal for future massive Microsoft's campaign ?

Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 30, 2007 22:19 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

This is true, with regards to Creative Commons. I will add, though, that almost every time I've seen someone distribute something under a CC license, they say which one: for instance, several blogs I read are either under "CC 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike", which qualifies as free under the FSF definition, or under "CC 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial-NoDerivs", which does not so qualify.

So yes, it's necessary to ask which CC license is in use, but responsible publishers will tell you anyway.

Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 30, 2007 22:32 UTC (Mon) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

khim wrote:

This will be huge PR blunder no matter what OSI will do.

Bullshit. OSI will advance its mission and protect its reputation by evaluating the submitted licences, when and if they're submitted, on their standalone merits using the Open Source Definition as the canonical yardstick.

Please note that Hilf and other Redmond flacks have reportedly not yet specified which of their "open" licences will be submitted at some equally unspecified future occasion, but Ms-PL and Ms-CL[1] strike me as being obviously open source on their face, and should be approved if and when submitted. Why the hell not? They're not particularly innovative or useful licences, but they do meet spec, and someone might actually find them handy.

Yes, Microsoft also state that several of their proprietary licences are "open", and yes, Creative Commons likewise publishes both proprietary and open source / free-software licences. If memory serves, both University of California and MIT have published code under proprietary licences; that didn't make it a "huge PR blunder" for OSI to certify the BSD and MIT/X11 licences.

But if even one license will be approved Microsoft will be able to use it for advertisement like "our shared source licensing got OSI approval! we are friends of Open Software now!"...

"Big corporation tells misleading partial truth! Film at 11!"

Welcome to the Internet. Meanwhile, back on earth, it's always been the case that you have to check software licence terms rather than simply assuming anything from a self-proclaimed "friend of open source" must be Double Plus Good.

[1] Open source as to the included files that are under reciprocal terms; same as with Mozilla Public License.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 30, 2007 22:52 UTC (Mon) by socket (subscriber, #43) [Link]

That's entirely the point of the Creative Commons licenses. Lawrence Lessig et al wanted to make a wide variety of licenses with different terms available to people who understand what permissions they want to allow, and what they want to require. It's boilerplate legalese so that people can check a few boxes indicating their preferences to get a corresponding license.

Nobody denies that CC licenses include "non-free" options. The idea, I think, is to demonstrate to people that there are more than two ways to license things, and to educate everyone that the details matter. Putting something under a CC license is more a statement that they're not going with the rules stock copyright provides; that they want something more nuanced. With this education, people are more likely to learn what copyright really signifies, and *why* people should care... which in turn may inspire people to learn about the "share-alike" options, which *are* free.

Licensing is the easy part - A fuzzy reply.

Posted Jul 31, 2007 2:00 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

There is also content you may not want to put under a free license.

In Australia a US-style "model release" is not required for people over 18 or for people in a public place. So the use of photographs from web sites in advertising campaigns is controlled entirely by the copyright license. In a recent advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile photos from Flickr of people not looking their best have been plastered across the cities. That's pretty unfair to the subject of the photograph.

There is a strong moral argument that the photographer should have at least used a non-free license to allow the subject to retain an appropriate level of privacy. Even better, of course, would have been the photographer asking the permission of the subject if they wanted publication once the subject had viewed the photo. I'll agree that Virgin Mobile and their advertising agency also have some difficulty with morals. After a backlash by the mobile-buying public Virgin are removing the posters.

I hope this example shows that there are reasonable uses for non-free licenses. Including a range of license types in Creative Commons allows rights holders to make an appropriate choice within a legal framework they know and trust.

It does not really matter why WHY the blunder happened

Posted Jul 31, 2007 5:17 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

May be they were created to educate someone, may be not, but as a result I often see misleading statistics related to CC: we have reached this or that milestone, we have great many creative works, etc. But how many of them are free ? This info is usually not included...

As I've said: there are nothing wrong with CC licenses if you'll consider each one as single entity. The concept of the CC license is harmful, on the other hand...

Now if CC were invented to educate and not confuse but still the confusion is spread around what will happen when someone who specifically target confusion is involved ?